How the Right’s Illiberal Past Became Present

In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagined an alternate history in which the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh captured the Republican nomination at a stalemated convention in Philadelphia in July 1940 and went on to win a surprise victory against Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The terror of the unforeseen,” Roth wrote, “is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” Roth’s Lindbergh allies America with the Axis powers, ponders war with Canada, and launches an anti-Jewish campaign. 

This unsettling “what if” scenario succeeds in part because it wasn’t all that iffy. On the eve of World War II, a powerful strain of autocratic thinking and sympathy for foreign dictators had captured the American right, just as it has in recent years. Its views—praise for Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco as decisive leaders who knew how to deal with decadent liberals, anti-immigrant sentiment, hostility to free trade, and an aversion to intervention abroad—often sound eerily familiar. It should not come as a surprise, then, that the resurgence of those views has prompted a bevy of journalists and scholars to attempt to explore and explain the right’s long-standing antipathy toward democracy and the rule of law.

In the run-up to Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh, as Paul M. Sparrow reminds us in Awakening the Spirit of America, was Roosevelt’s foremost public antagonist in leading the America First Committee to oppose any American aid to Great Britain, let alone entry into World War II. The Lone Eagle, as Lindbergh was known, hardly had to go it alone. Instead, he commanded not only the support of numerous wealthy industrialists but also members of Congress in his crusade to stymie Roosevelt and to bolster the Third Reich. Lindbergh had visited Germany several times, including in October 1938, when Luftwaffe head Hermann Goering presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Lindbergh never repudiated the medal. 

Far from simply being an isolationist, Lindbergh, a devotee of Nordic racial theory (he secretly fathered numerous children with a variety of German women after World War II), admired the Nazis, whom he saw as a vital force in opposing a Bolshevik takeover of Europe. After one Lindbergh radio broadcast that dismissed “hysterical chatter” about the perils of a Nazi victory in Europe, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.” 

Lindbergh’s expressions of support for Nazi Germany have a familiar ring to them. Just as contemporary opponents of assistance to Ukraine deny that there is any real difference between it and Russia, or even take the side of the latter, so Lindbergh, under the badge of foreign policy “realism,” dismissed the notion that there was any real difference between the combatants, with one side representing democracy and the other totalitarianism. Lindbergh knew better. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, he explained that “the Germans … claim the right of an able and virile nation to expand—to conquer territory and influence by force of arms as other nations have done at one time or another throughout history.” Sparrow ably brings out the role that Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, played in fortifying these sentiments in her best-selling book The Wave of the Future. It claimed that fascism was inevitable and democracy a relic of the past.

Indeed, as David Austin Walsh underscores in Taking America Back, his comprehensive and provocative study of the historical intertwining of mainstream American conservatism and the far right, it was democracy itself that the political right objected to from the 1930s onward in its perfervid opposition to the New Deal. For reactionary American business elites, the term democracy itself became synonymous with a communist plot to destroy America. It was authoritarians such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco whom America should support and emulate. Walsh seeks to demonstrate that a kind of right-wing “popular front” emerged a century ago in opposition to socialism, communism, and liberalism. He dismisses the notion that there were significant differences between the mainstream and radical right. Rather, he suggests that much more consanguinity existed than has commonly been appreciated. Walsh is part of a cohort of younger historians who believe that the extent of the native radicalism of the right, then and now, has often been downplayed or ignored by the media and scholars, with its tribunes often dismissed as crackpots when, in fact, they have exercised a good deal of influence on its direction. 

Walsh thus devotes much attention to colorful figures such as Elizabeth Dilling, an anti-Semitic agitator, and Merwin K. Hart, a reactionary New York businessman. Both played an important role in the 1930s in promoting support for Franco and in denouncing Roosevelt’s New Deal as tantamount to a communist conspiracy. “The ‘kooks’ and the sober anti-communist conservatives,” Walsh writes, “found themselves agreeing on most of the pressing issues of the day, including the most significant international issue after 1936, the Spanish Civil War.” Hart was also an enthusiastic backer of Lindbergh, whom he wrote to support after the latter delivered a notorious denunciation of Jewish influence in America during a speech in Des Moines on behalf of the America First Committee. 

But as Walsh cogently observes, Lindbergh and Hart were not outliers: 

Political anti-Semitism—the belief that Jews had an undue influence in the Roosevelt administration and, through this influence, were subverting America’s traditions and replacing them with the socialism and communism of the New Deal state—was commonplace on the American right in the 1930s and 1940s.

After World War II, Hart became a mentor to William F. Buckley Jr. (the author of God and Man at Yale, a defense of free market capitalism and religion, and the founder in 1955 of the National Review magazine) as well as the head of the New York chapter of the John Birch Society. 

What explains the persistence of this reactionary spirit down to today? In his lively and compelling Rebellion, Robert Kagan, who served in the State Department during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and has become a leading Never Trumper, suggests that American history consists of two forces vying for supremacy, the first one liberalism (good) and the second one anti-liberalism (bad). He sees the origins of America’s difficulties in what he describes as the split between the colonists who supported slavery and those who championed universal rights. “The new, radically liberal tradition in America,” he writes, “would from the beginning be accompanied by an anti-liberal tradition every bit as potent.”

Kagan sees this baleful tradition as reemerging after World War I, when internationalism took it on the chin as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and others denounced the League of Nations. According to Kagan, “with shameless hypocrisy, these two leading internationalist Republicans now openly equated ‘internationalism’ with Bolshevism and pointedly, and absurdly, singled out the Jewish Leon Trotsky as the evil genius behind it all.” Kagan believes that these impulses linger on down to the present. “Rather remarkably,” Kagan writes, “even a century later, Republicans are still warning of ‘globalists’ and ‘cosmopolitans.’ ”

But is it remarkable? Or do reactionary sentiments in fact form the essence of the right? Dividing up American history between liberalism and anti-liberalism may be a nifty organizing device, but it does run the risk of simplifying a complex past, not to mention branding anyone who disagrees with Kagan as retrograde and anti-liberal. Kagan forthrightly acknowledges that “many of the institutions that would later play a role in the takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 were hatched and nurtured during the Reagan years.” But there is something a little pat about his suggestion that in 1980 Reagan’s election owed less to the rise of anti-liberal conservatism than to the decline of liberalism during the late 1960s and ’70s, when issues such as school busing, welfare, abortion, affirmative action, and anti-communism became potent issues, leading to the rise of both the neoliberal and neoconservative movements.

It was the neoconservative movement, mostly made up of former liberals (much as Reagan himself had been a former fan of the New Deal), that provided a higher-toned gloss for the long-standing desire on the right to roll back not only the civil rights movement but also communism. Hostility to international organizations such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court was part and parcel of the desire to ensure that America had the freedom to intervene unilaterally, whenever and wherever it chose. What is missing in Kagan’s account is any reckoning with the second Iraq War, which he championed and which helped fuel Donald Trump’s high-octane rise to power in 2016, when he promised to revert to America First and put an end to foreign adventurism.

Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. provides a trenchant account that indicates that Trump, for all his bluster about America First, is part of a global phenomenon—namely, the rise of an international kleptocracy that often works in tandem. Applebaum, who has written extensively on Russia and Ukraine, believes that a new group of autocrats has arisen which operates not like an ideological bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, welded together “by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power.” They see NATO, the European Union, and their own dissidents as adversaries. Above all, their enmity toward the West, Applebaum indicates, is not rooted in some form of old-fashioned geopolitical competition, stemming from 19th-century Europe; rather, they see democracy, the rule of law, political opposition, and independent journalism as representing direct threats to their own rule.

For Applebaum, a brave new world of international finance has emerged, ensuring that kleptocracy and autocracy operate together seamlessly to shore up the rule of the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. According to Applebaum, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.” She notes that one in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings was purchased anonymously. In London, Russian oligarchs had a field day procuring expensive mansions, some of which they never even inhabited, to launder their ill-gotten gains. Applebaum also points to the Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of properties in midwestern America as part of a money-laundering operation connected to his defrauding of the Ukrainian PrivatBank. U.S. businessmen and lawyers, she observes, were just as culpable as Ukrainians in making it all happen.

One of Applebaum’s most intriguing insights is that anti-democratic forces can resemble start-ups. She notes that the first investors in the original Russian Wagner Group now appear to be contemplating the creation of franchises. Russia is, in essence, creating regime survival packages that can include personal protection for a dictator, assaults on political enemies, and social media campaigns. In her view, “a world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia.” It already exists. Applebaum is right that the opportunities have multiplied, but it is also the case that dictators such as the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos or Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe were no slouches when it came to enriching themselves, either. The history of plunder is itself a rich one that she might have alluded to in dilating on the latest generation of gangsters masquerading as international statesmen.

What can be done? Applebaum points to the need to undermine the disinformation campaigns that foreign countries such as Russia are waging against America, extolling the work of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which has exposed Russian tactics and campaigns even before they are launched. She calls for joint efforts with foreign governments to bolster democratic media and civic organizations in Africa or Latin America. And she points to the risks of the democratic world’s dependence on China, Russia, and other countries for minerals or energy supplies. “Those business relationships,” she writes, “are corrupting our own societies.” Here Applebaum might have alluded to the efforts that Joe Biden’s administration has embarked on to stymie foreign corruption. In December 2023, for example, Biden signed into law the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The law renders it a crime for a foreign official in any capacity to extort or provide a bribe from an American or American company. Until now, it was only Americans who were subject to punishment; the new law opens up foreign officials to prosecution.

It would be easy to despair about the state of what was once proudly referred to as the free world, but Zack Beauchamp’s The Reactionary Spirit offers a valuable antidote to excessive hand-wringing about the plight of Western democracy. “Predictions of its imminent doom, of its obsolescence in the face of an authoritarian challenge have been proven wrong,” he writes, “repeatedly for the last two hundred years.” Today’s authoritarians, he notes, drape themselves in the garb of democracy, whether it is Putin or Orbán or Trump. Exposing them is a necessary step. Another is remembering that surrender is not an option. The determined championing of democracy by its true friends and advocates can help ensure that the forces of reaction remain no more than that.